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How w o u l d s o m e common English sayings translate in Hindi???

Have a nice day!
* Achcha din lo!

What’s up?
*Uppar kya hai?

You’re kidding!
*Tum bachcha bana rahe ho!

Don’t kid me!
* Mera bachcha mat banaao!

Yo, baby! What’s up?
* Beti Yo, uppar kya hai?

Cool man!
* Thandaa aadmi!

Check this out, man!
* Iskee chaanbeen karo, aadmi!

Don’t mess with me, dude.
* Mere saath gandagi mat karo, e vyakti.

She’s so fine!
* Woh itnee baareek hai!

Listen buddy, that chick’s mine, okay!?
* Suno dost, woh chooza mera hai, theek?

Hey good looking; what’s cooking?
* Arrey sundarta ki devi; kya pakaa rahee ho?

Are you nuts?
* Kya aap akhrot hain?

Son of a gun.
* Bachcha bandook ka.

Rock the party.
* Party mein patthar feko.

How do you do?
* Kaise karte ho?

Keep in touch!
* Chhoote Raho.

Lets hang out!
* Chalo bahar latakte hain ………..

[email fwd]

• Derek K. Miller - Penmachine words music comment - Vancouver, Canada
  To boil it down: my cancer has grown and spread. My goals now are to see the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver in 2010, and beyond that to renew my driver’s license when it expires again in five years.[..]I might not live that long, that I might be dead b
• Bollywood Movie Still Hot After 12 Years - Forbes.com
  They’ve been lining up, every day, for 12 years. For the same movie. “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,”
• Coding Horror: Learning, or, Learning How To Learn
  Programming is, almost by definition, continuously learning: your entire career will be one long, unbroken string of learning one new bit of technology after another. Every ten years the software development field reinvents itself, and it’s our job to kee
  (tags: programming learning)

Yahoo! pipes was announced back in Feb but somehow I had not tried it. Desperate to mix and play around with feeds, I tried few services like FeedBlender, rssmix and finally with much resistance tried out Pipes. But soon I liked it so much that I spent lot of time trying out various things and had fun. The interface itself is artistic/aesthetic, before even thinking about the use. Rss mixing, I am sure, is just one of its functionalities and looking at it only as an rssmix alternative tool is injustice to its power.

I have put together almost all feeds related to my online activity (blog, cocomments,twitter,picasa,delicious) here. I was feeling proud about my brilliant idea of redirecting my blog’s feed to the above feed, but it is somewhat stupid. Any guesses why ? It may not serve any major purpose now apart from the fun of experimentation and having things at one place.

Here is what visionaries say about Pipes:
Tim O’Reilly :

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.[..]This is something I’ve been waiting nearly ten years for.[..]hey allow developers to use two websites in a way that their creators didn’t quite intend, which extends them and makes them more useful. But mashups have generally been limited in their scope, pairwise combinations with their output typically being simply another web site. That is, the pipes and filter mechanism had not been generalized.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mashups.[..]Pipes can simply be used as a kind of “power browser.” [..] For example, you can build a custom mashup to search for traffic along your own routes every morning, or a news aggregator that searches multiple sites for subjects you care about. All you have to do is start with one of the existing modules

Anil:

There’s also another key accomodation of social functionality: Pipes is pretty.[..]Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is. It lets Yahoo unequivocally be first at something, and if you count the broader market of web-based application development tools, it lets Yahoo be best at something, too. It’s innovative, exciting, and well-done.

TechCrunch

It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception.[...] It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.

The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application

And Library clips has few links :

More than just RSS mixing, it allows you to manipulate the data at a granular level, eg. translate data, scan for location metadata within the feed source, limit items in the feed, sort the items in the feed.

Once again, my experiment’d pipe is here. (Click edit source / clone )
**

Talking of mashups, google mashup is the latest on the block. Spent sometime at it Here are few links related to google mashups and looking at the samples , I can think of some similar mashups that could be cooked like

• hotels/eatouts in bangalore
• cricket team’s matches , dates, venues, news, message board

**
And oh yes, Ajax Slideshow from my picasa album is running on the sidebar. Tried in vain, to include it in the post

• http://tinyurl.com/27rzc8
  ROFL ! #
• Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak. Socrates #
• @sripathikamath : Signed up for pownce invite..looks good…from Kevin of Digg ! #

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• 10 Developers For The Price Of One
  (tags: productivity management development programming)
• Billionaire Thinks in Trillions for His Computer Designs - New York Times
  About Bechtolsheim

• Google analytics finally working (different plugin though)#
• @Sudhakar: whats SN? #
• @sripathikamath: thats right, there is another person with username rk #
• “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” George Santayana #

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• Good Morning: “Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it.” Dianne Feinstein #
• Lunch with client. Burp! Sleepy now. #
• I *totally* appreciate the GD being a part of interviews. Some people can *never* listen to others nor shut-up but enjoy shouting in meeting #

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• Virtual bubblewrap: the best / worst gadget ever made - Engadget
  //But… is it USB powered?;but what about those times when you just wanna wrap yourself up in bubble wrap and roll around on the ground?;but can it handle the weight of a 200lbs person standing on it?// LOL
  (tags: Fun)

• jaiku - comments = twitter + twitterfeed #
• @nvnbk: now that you are on jaiku, check twitku.com ! #
• @Sudhakar: Bitte schoen :), u configured your mobile to recieve updates ? u following me ? #
• Good Morning: As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. George Bernard Shaw #
• G’gle calendar now sends sms notifications (Bsnl worked even though not mentioned) Sigh! I had almost decided to stop using mobile … #

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• Good Morning: It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. Decouvertes #
• @nvnbk: firewall issue btw, the sms went today and 5 MORE rs cut but still it is not activated here. i give up. lucky u. damn. #

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• Updated Wp to 2.2.1. Cheated by not deactivating plugins and repeated posts on main page is the punishment #

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• How a Tiny Start-up Company Attracted Big-Company Talent
  (tags: creativity)
• South Pacific island - Weird discovery made on the high seas - on Bore Me
  Floating sand to formation of island in 20 pictures.
  (tags: Science photos)

• Takedowns: Dell Admits Error In Asking Consumerist To Remove Post - Consumerist
  (tags: Business)
• Ubuntu repels Microsoft patent threat - vnunet.com
  Ha!

• Battle at Kruger - Unbelievable brawl in the safari
  A small buffalo gets taken away by some lions. A group of crocodiles battle the lions for the buffalo. Then a herd of buffaloes come back and kick the lions’ ass.
  (tags: fun video)

• The 50 best business blogs-Business-Industry Sectors-Media-TimesOnline
  Hmm…I have to shorten my reader subscription, no ?
  (tags: Blogs)

I had registered for twitter way back in December. For the unknown, it constantly asks you to answer one simple question “what are you doing” either at the site or from IM. It allows you to follow/subscribe to see what your friends are doing. Thats all, no big deal. In short it is like the status message shown on gtalk. Or say orkut self scraps + friends scraps at one place.

But after hanging around a little (2 minutes), I had no idea why it would make sense or how it was supposed to work or any clue why one would use it. I have my blog for my updates and twitter was like self-scrapping in orkut ¹ . And then there is always orkut itself. And I did not want to give one more url related to me to others when the subscribers on this blog itself is 31 ² — hey thats a good news by the way. Hello every thirtyone !!

Distractions, I say! Back to topic.

But twitter saw a huge increase in numbers during SxSw , later they had scaling problems, analysis of increase in numbers showed it increasing at a rate higher than blogs. And now it or its cousins have become a hit. See this site to visually see the updates to twitter acorss the globe - TwitterVision ⁴. There is one with a photo messaging. . And digg+twitter = truemors.

Kept hearing a lot about it but I kept ignoring it but finally, recently understood one key factor which I think makes it work (more than any other reason) : its sms alerts in US - to send or recieve twits - which will instantly deliver the updates to “what are you doing” to those who follow you. Suddenly it makes sense to me⁵ :). Call it mobile-blogging or mundane updates or whatever, its success is quite huge !

In India, alternatives are present like Webaroo [via] but none are offering free sms I know thats too much to ask for but I somehow feel, if such a service comes up ⁶, it would be a hit like orkut, among my peers - some of who are lazy to read/write blog.

Here is my twitter page, twitter feed. You might have observed the pretty thingy on the sidebar too. Once I upgrade the WP, using Twitter tools plugin I will think of integrating in some other way.

Lots of support sites to twitter have born of which - email to twitter and firefox plugin twitbin are my favorites. Other firefox twitter tools.

I guess none of you are on twitter, add me as friend when you join To help you start with, here is starter guide. Huge resource list/help here. Thats it for those with short attention span. Rest can continue reading.

I don’t think in recent times anything has generated as much discussion as the twitter - especially the opinions being diagonally opposite to each other- one swearing this has been the most stupidest and other saying this was being waited for. One saying most unproductive, time wasting-distracting tool to another explaining how it could be put to use

Twitter can be distracting, but it can be useful. It’s up to you.

to explaining how you could be industry expert to how smart men use it.
One swearing its death is around the corner (208 comments) and its just hyped up and other claiming this will long last -(or that twitter to this decade is what email/sms/blog was for previous decade). There will be either an article or an application (either useful or just for fun or “most bizzare app for twitter”) every week or other. ( Even those that I have not linked to are on web, too lazy to search and link)

What I personally think is that - its a damn good integration of various features and it is different for each one depending on how you want to use them. Its like digg for some, its like blogging for some, its just social networking with its connectivity being instant - sms/im. Or for some it could be a combination of all these.

Social networking like orkut, for me now is huge time wasting - unless you are using it while in office! - in the sense that there is no value gain, but among my friends attitude like mine is rare. Even generally, orkut has not died! Today you might understand orkut but I remember when it came about, most of my friends did not join for almost an year - there was “whats orkut?” from everyone (or probably it was totally due to different reason). But today everyone gets the idea with orkut. There is no reason twitter can be any different. In fact it could be more catchy since there are different ways to use it, you need not always log in, the plugins will still operate from office even in twitter is blocked, sms/im interface will let you be in touch even when not using office internet.

Coming to blogging, again, I know lot of people who are lazy to read blogs. For them since all their friends updates is available at one place, it helps. Those of you who are too lazy to have a blog or those of you who are clueless what to update on the blog, this still will work for you.
from here

1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was and had a lower barrier to entry.
2. Twitter has more ways to update (web, phone, IM, Twitterific) than did Blogger.
3. Blogger’s growth was limited by a lack of funding.
4. Twitter had a larger pool of potential users to draw on.
5. Twitter has a built-in social aspect that Blogger did not.
6. Twitter’s 140-character limit encourages more messages.
7. More people are using Twitter for conversations than was the case with Blogger.

Here are links to twitter tips and tricks , twitter-blog integration tools.
And here is a description to micro blogging and twitter

Media companies such as the BBC , The New York Times and Al Jazeera are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. The campaigns for presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama also have Twitter profiles, with thousands of “friends” and “followers” who check out updates.

On a post that says how twitter is a hot cake to be bought over now, Scoble points to the immense advertising oppurtunity

You’re missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE. If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you’ll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I’d hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I’d start building a database of behaviors shared. Someone say “changing the diapers.” Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!

Those who are still reading, here is some more info. One of the people behind twitter is the same who created blogger.

Ev jumpstarted the blogging revolution and tried to do the same with podcasting until Apple jumped into the ring and squashed all the competition. Twitter is his well deserved second home run.

From

There are several cousins of twitter on the same model like dodgeball,(acquired by Google), groovr but a little more famous is jaiku which came a little late than twitter but it includes lot of other things including an important difference - allows feeding to be imported on mainstream. ⁷
Jaiku is like blog posts+Twitter stream+Flickr photos (hey, thats what my yahoo pipe is also!) . Here are differenceexplaining links.

Jaiku is more of who you are than what are you doing which is twitter..[..]Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.What’s the difference? Well what you chat about and ‘do’ is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.
“

Blogging is like putting up stalls in an exhibition and speaking the mind blindfolded. Some people enter the room, listen to you and/or converse with you. Chatting is exactly like chatting over a cup of coffee. Orkut scrapping is like, peeking into neighbour’s house to see if he is there and to talk to him, if he isn’t there to leave a note. Emailing is posting a mail to someone. Twitter is somewhat a combination of some of these in the sense it allows multi way communication cum broadcasting plus more.⁸

My final take:
As with any social communication tool, this tends to be addictive, time wasting, interfering, distracting but again as with other services, its quite fun, could be put to use, great way to keep in touch, neat microblogging utility, an unbelievable good combination or orkut+sms+blog+digg, and if you follow me on twitter, I shall follow you
Right now I am twittering in vaccum, come join and hear me
And this is my jaiku lifestream.

Ps: Ah!, this is the length of posts that would do justice to Talkr ! But you can’t follow the links then. Lots of useful links there, let me know how many you clicked.

Footnotes:
[1] I always wondered why did they not plugin the blogs within orkut - either create a new one or to link to the existing blogpost, rest of the footnote grew enough to be a post!
[2] according to Feedburner ³ - which again I had an account long ago but never used it until Google announced to buy it over. Feedburner, I guess that time did not provide email alerts or something, due to which I used Feedster -which gave lot of options. Now feedburner lets me connect feedster for email alerts and after google buying it I thought I can remember one less uname/pwd and logged in now. Now this blog’s feed is redirected to Feedburner feed (via the plugin) and fed to you!! So there, all for you, my dear 31 readers . Now click that ad there or at least leave a comment for my this selfless act!
[3] I know there is some noise there, I should not have tried various feed services with my own feed. Now there is no way to delete it.
[4]Have you seen FlickrVision?
[5]also, as you know I am a huge fan of sms
[6] Inactiv in Karnataka gave such a service but one thing lacking is a web user interface
[7]there is twitku which integrates to look up to updates from both accounts.
[8]Who would have thought The Trueman Show could get real and practical ?

I have now put talkr plugin which automatically converts my posts to audio so that one can listen to it. Again, not that I blog often or that I have posts to be listened or the audience, for all I care, it might be very sporadic as usual now that I have finished my old posts. But experimenting with the site and trying out plugins is my favorite big time passtime.

Talking of talkr, I initially thought converting to mp3 was the ubercool feature of Documents sharing site - scribd.com. I thought thats the fastest way I can convert my posts to audio (or even to pdf ) ! But thats just a side effect and actually its youtube for docs and quite wonderful documents and email forwards kind of documents are available. A very web2.0 site that it is, I liked the most was its interface and the flash paper format. Just the interface makes me use it

If only there was a plugin to
1. (Automatically) Post the blog posts to scibd from my account
2. Link to the bottom automatically the mp3 link of that document.

Anyways came across talkr and odiogo services which do the auto conversion to audio. So you would find audio link ( unfortunately at the bottom of the post ) thanks to this plugin. Do listen.

I would have liked if we could choose between male and female voice though.

Recently Orkut has been doubling up as feed reader. But the real meat is getting scrap book updates through feeds. It might not make sense to some of you but for a feed junkie like me, it is super stuff¹ . I feel one of the prime differences between other leading Social Networking sites and orkut is the absense of Feed support in orkut. And no one has real clue why Google does not give as much as importance orkut deserved, from the beginning. It took a loooong time to be able to use Google login to orkut accounts and the no donut problem was a surprise when it came from Google!

Coming to the main topic, here is how you can get the rss feed of your orkut scrapbook. [via TechBuzz]

Use the URL given below, but replace {uid} with your Orkut user ID

http://www.indian-tv.com/orkut.php?uid={uid}

Your Orkut User ID can be obtained by logging into Orkut and clicking on the profile button on the left.

.
And here is how you can get Rss feed for the communities in orkut.

http://www.indian-tv.com/orkut.php?cmm={community id}

Super stuff, thanks dude !

1. Also orkut is blocked in office but reader isn’t:D [back]

Update: Eureka !! I’m right. This is in update to this post. As guessed in the comments there, it turned out to be Amw@y after all. This happened very next day but updating the blog now.

Yesterday he said he would talk to me sometime today but instead of talking to me he took my number. I also observed him from morning, I was doubting every move. He spoke to few people and took an appointment to meet them. He joined me for coffee. He wanted to join for lunch but I escaped. Now it was becoming very clear. While returning, I asked what was it about. He said “priv@te franchi$ing”, have you heard about it. I wanted to scream “Oh, is it Amw@y..please stay away”, but instead said I dont know. He said he would call me up to discuss about it.

Today again he gave big smiles to me. He asked me what would I be doing in the evening. I knew this was coming. I said I have to meet my friend. He said, ok lets talk for a minute. He took me out, secretively. And the bs talk happened. “You should have a vision. We are not into technical. It involves hard work. More the work more the returns. It’s a good concept where in lies the 80% of world. It requires smart work. I am expanding in India in 800 locations. Our company is present since 50 years. I am doing it for my security. We recruit only passionate people. Why dont you come down in the evening and have a look at what we are doing ? About 300-400 people are gathering today. Let me know before 5Pm as it is an invited business presentation. People can attend only on invitation “…..etc blah blah blah to pull/suck people.

All the while I was smiling in my mind.

I am so proud of myself. I could see the future But regret for not having rejected it at the first chance.

Will narrate another victory in my life.

Long ago, while in Mumbai itself, my father had come across this stuff. This time it was from another relative who, after knowing that my father has got retired, wanted to introduce a business scheme. At the same time another friend too started introducing the scheme. You should see how friendly these people get when they want to introduce the scheme. They will vanish without trace after the deal is rejected, they are busy with their business you see !
So the motivational books, cassettes started coming in. Since it was first time for me I was pretty hopeful and excited about finding a new business opportunity and success path. It was in my mind everywhere I went. So I spoke about it to my friend, Bk, who immediately dismissed the thought and gave all details. He too was a victim. He said only by making more members, and not by marketing the goods, do we make money. But from the outset the deal is to market some magical products which could reduce the cost of household expenses by great margin.

I had been to a product demo which showed - a single concentrated liquid, they said could be used either to wash clothes or to clean toilets or to brush your teeth or to etc by only varying the degree of dilution. (That very explanation motivated me to doubt them. It is such a false claim - imagine if the toilet cleaner’s composition is same as the tooth paste’s !) I also understood the points creation. The 1000 or more points would be redeemed by 1paise and in the motivational and invitational seminars these people organize, they claim big earners and announce the earnings in Lakhs (what is left unsaid is whether the Lakhs is Rs or points). People in top positions would be doing this business, they claim. Money is also generated by making the members attend some programmes - like a workshop in Mumbai. The commission on the sales of such tickets add to the points earned. It is such things which add points and not due to the sales of products. I was equipped with all such information now but my father could not reject the pursual and bought a ticket for the initial business presentation (yeah this too adds up to his points earning).

I knew everything. I did not want to go. But I was forced to go. But I didn’t know that it would boost my confidence Many people had gathered there to “explore” and “understand” this new “business opportunity” which would help then earn “lakhs of rupees” and give them “life long security”. But they were clueless unlike me. So a person with all enthusiasm started talking to me outside the venue. We were there half an hour early. He wondered what this would be about. I gave all the details I had in a very calm voice, in a very clear manner and without a bit of exaggeration. I told only what I knew. He asked many questions and I answered. I also told the hidden cost “to register 6.5k”. He was totally disillusioned. He said “I am a business man. I own a shop to sell dresses in Rajajinagar. If I invest 6.5k there and work hard I would “surely” gain more returns. Also I would make my customers happy. Thank you very much sir for enlightening me”. He was very happy to have avoided falling into trap. He was disappointed that he had wasted time to come here instead of sitting at his shop but he was happy that he wont waste any more time now, not even the presentation. He tore the Rs.30 ticket and handed over to me his visiting card and asked me to visit him. He left.

I was proud of myself. I could really do marketing. I can really speak and sell something. This is yet another achievement of my convincing power !¹

But I didn’t have the liberty not to attend the presentation. I went through the brainfart for the evening but returned home very satisfied with my deed of saving a person and feeling good about myself.

Sorry if I hurt someone who is into the business. I am sure you are doing it, knowing what you are doing. But I must say people gain tremendous confidence in this business and improve their inter-personal skills beyond imagination. They think of themselves as huge self sufficient business men where as others are cheap bonded laborers. They communicate better than before, become huge convincing salespersons - selling dreams and products and memberships and all. What they perhaps don’t understand is the behind-the-back impression people might have about them.

1. Another achievement about my convincing power I am proud of, was to make a girl laugh, who was weeping over having got less marks in the board exams. That is for some other day! [back]

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  AirCar is coming …
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• Finnish traffic tickets - from WSJ
  Based on the income he had claimed at the time, each fine was $750. The judge, outraged, imposed additional fines of $38,000. [via del.icio.us/btbytes]
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• Goodbye wires… - MIT News Office
  MIT team experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer, potentially useful for powering laptops, cell phones without cords
  (tags: Energy Interesting Innovation)
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  A Chinese company has claimed to have developed the world’s first solar-powered mobile phone that uses sun’s energy to recharge itself. The company says .. phone can also be recharged by light from other sources including candles.
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  I think that the work-earn-spend (and over-spend) cycle has not, in fact, resulted in more ‘happiness’ but rather in a condition of ‘Affluenza’ …Sometimes, being frugal means not just saving money; sometimes it means not spending any at all.
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  I have to recheck myself.
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